


Far-Off, Unhappy Things

by Laelior



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Blood and Injury, Freeform, Gen, Non-Graphic Descriptions of Surgery, a little bit of shenko in the background, battle of the citadel, but not the main focus of this story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-05
Packaged: 2021-03-15 09:47:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28561536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laelior/pseuds/Laelior
Summary: In the fifteen years since Rahna last saw Kaidan, she's moved on with her life after BAaT and made peace with what happened. But catching a glimpse of him in the news while she's dealing with the aftermath of the Battle of the Citadel brings back far-off, unhappy memories.
Relationships: Kaidan Alenko & Rahna
Comments: 11
Kudos: 8





	Far-Off, Unhappy Things

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a nod to the ME1 sidequest "Old, Unhappy, Far-Off Things."
> 
> This takes place right after the Battle of the Citadel at the end of ME1.
> 
> CW: blood, injury, non-graphic descriptions of surgery and death

There’s a simple rhythm to emergency surgery. 

Read triage notes, decide treatment, carry it out to the best of her ability, and either hand the patient off to the care team when she’s done or helplessly watch them die on her table.

Or at least, that’s the rhythm Rahna works to now as a tidal wave of casualties from the largest battle the galaxy has seen since this side of the krogan rebellion trickles through her operating room on an Alliance hospital ship at the outskirts of the chaos that is already being called the Battle of the Citadel.

Read, treat, hand off, repeat. No time to mourn the dead, no time to think beyond what needs to be done. Read, treat, declare time of death, repeat. On and on for hours, for what feels like days now. Read, treat, hand off, repeat.

“Get the laser scalpel hot and remove the tourniquet when I say go,” she says, giving crisp and mechanical instructions to her attending nurses. 

“Ready, Dr. Arslan,” the nurse holding the tourniquet says. They barely need her instructions. They’re already in position and Tavers, the head nurse, is already handing her the warmed up laser scalpel. They work like a well-oiled machine to repair the Alliance soldier’s femoral artery before he can bleed to death. The smell of blood, of burning flesh fills her nostrils but it no longer bothers her.

This one she hands off to the care team. If he survives the next 24 hours, he will live but have a scar on his thigh to show for it despite her efforts to minimize the damage.

The next one she doesn’t. She tries to save her, slathering burn gel on the third-degree burns covering most of her body, but the anoxia of hard vacuum killed her before she reached the operating room. Her body is only just now realizing it. She is only nineteen years old. Time of death: 0130 hours.

“We need more medi-gel,” she says when the orderlies come to take the body away.

When she looks up from the body, the room is empty of patients to be treated. It’s only her and her team of nurses and techs in their blood-spattered smocks looking shocked at the sudden lull in activity.

“That’s it for now, Doc,” Tavers says. “I got a ping that the Fifth Fleet is sending another transport our way, though. ETA one hour, so we should try and shower and take a quick nap before it gets here.”

“But the medi-gel—” she starts to say, but Tavers puts a hand on her shoulder and gently pushes her toward the OR’s exit.

“I’ll get the orderlies to take care of it. Go and get some rest, Rahna. You can’t save any lives if you’re asleep on your feet,” he says with a gentle, chiding tone.

“But—”

“No buts. Out you go!” He gives her a soft push out into the corridor and the door hisses shut behind her. The sudden quiet, away from the hum of the scanners and operating tools, makes her feel like she’s suddenly deaf. Even her footsteps as she walks mechanically down the corridor to the lounge sound unnaturally muted. 

The lounge smells heavily of coffee and antiseptics. Only one other person is there, a fellow surgeon, lying on the couch under a thin polyester blanket and seemingly asleep with an arm flung over his face as his quiet snores intermingle with the new broadcast on the vidscreen. She sinks tiredly onto the lounge’s only other couch, and she’s not sure if the furniture or her exhausted body creaks more. _Tavers was right, I need a break_. She rolls up her sleeves, eyes glossing over the old scar on her right forearm, and tries to relax.

 _Breaking News_ flashes on the ribbon across the bottom of the vidscreen again. There’s _Breaking News_ every fifteen minutes, it seems. Updated casualty reports from the geth attack on the Citadel, damage, names of the ships torn apart and left to drift in the battle. It never ends. It’s a maelstrom of wreckage, human and alien, that doesn’t let up. It’s easy to tune it out when she’s working, to keep treading water while she is up to her elbows in the blood of the people who survived saving the galaxy and those dying for the same. But now, when it’s the quietest it’s been for a full rotation, now when she’s alone with her own thoughts, she closes her eyes, lets the words wash over her, and braces herself for the next wave. 

“This is Emily Wong, reporting from the Citadel.” Static cuts across the broadcast, rendering it choppy. It makes Emily's now-familiar voice seem breathless, excitable. “We’re receiving reports from anonymous sources within C-Sec that Commander Shepard, first human Spectre, and who warned the Council about the actions of the rogue Spectre Saren, has been found in the Citadel Tower by search and rescue teams. Leaked footage shows the commander injured, but alive.”

Rahna opens one eye, cautiously, at the first hint of positive news to come across the vidscreen in longer than she can remember. Video footage plays on the screen of a human woman being helped out of a heap of wreckage. She limps with the help of a C-Sec agent, but it’s the way she holds her left arm close to her body that catches Rahna’s eye. _Dislocated shoulder, possibly fractured radius_ , she finds herself thinking automatically. 

The C-Sec agent helps her hobble toward another human in Alliance armor. The camera pans to him, a handsome, dark-haired human in his early thirties, and suddenly there is a fist closing around her lungs and stealing her breath.

Suddenly, she is seventeen years old again, her whole world turned upside down and shipped off the edge of the solar system. Alone in the cold, sterile corridors of that station that would try its best to break her, surrounded by people who look at her like a test tube specimen and not a scared, lonely teenager. 

She is seventeen again, finding her footing in the strange new world she’s been thrust into, making friends to forge a sense of normalcy. One boy in particular stammers and blushes when she talks to him and she decides it’s cute. “My name’s Kaidan,” he tells her shyly, and she falls a little in love with him in a shallow way for how his obvious attraction feeds her teenage ego.

She is seventeen, exploring the highs and lows of teenage love in the press of soft lips and the tangle of limbs and tousled hair that is equal parts awkward and tender. A soft place in the maelstrom that surrounds them.

She is seventeen, feeling the agony of the snapped bone in her arm on top of the exhaustion and terror of the sudden whirlwind of violence Vyrnnus unleashes on her. She is hearing Kaidan scream, smelling the sharp metallic tang of blood in the air. The sudden swell of ozone as a biotic flare sears over the room and the sharp _crack_ of breaking bone. The nausea as Vyrnnus falls bonelessly to the floor.

She is seventeen and walking away from Kaidan, coldly pushing him away out of fear, unable to disentangle her fear of the powers they share from fear of what he'd done and the shameful feeling that if she’d been stronger, none of it would have happened.

She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath, and when she opens them, she is thirty-two again and seeing his face again for the first time in fifteen years. She is no longer a frightened seventeen-year old girl rejecting her powers and the boy who has always represented them in her mind. 

On the vidscreen, Kaidan looks at Commander Shepard like she’s the only person in the entire universe. She even sees his thumb brush across her cheek in what is probably a flagrant breach of military protocol. He looks relieved, happy as he helps her shuffle away from what used to be the Council chambers. As the shock of seeing him again after so long starts to wear off, she can start to see him as a grown man and not a teenage boy. A man who’s also moved on and found a direction in his life with the Alliance.

The revelation that shocks her exhausted mind most of all is how relieved she is to see him looking happy. She has never been able to wash herself of the shame of his last, heartbroken look at her all those years ago. It has taken her time and work to move past what happened at Jump Zero, but she has never forgotten that painful parting.

She opens her messages in her omni-tool and enters his name in the recipient field of a new message, but no words come to her that can possibly express the full range of bittersweet regret that sweeps through her. Nothing she can say to tell him how happy she is for him, and nothing that can encompass how sorry she is for how she treated him.

She doesn’t know how long she sits there with her omni-tool open and nothing in the body of the message she longs to send. The vidscreen continues to broadcast increasingly jubilant news about Commander Shepard’s survival, resulting in Kaidan’s face flashing across the screen several more times. Each time it gets easier to not get caught up in the memories.

“Paging Dr. Arslan, Dr. Arslan please report to OR 5. Dr. Arslan to OR 5,” a voice suddenly crackles over the ship’s intercom. Rahna starts at the sound of her name, and the sleeping surgeon on the other couch briefly grunts in annoyance before turning over and going back to sleep.

She saves the unwritten message to her drafts and picks herself up from the couch. She will send him a message, eventually, when she can find the words to express all she needs to say. A glance at the chron on the wall tells her that her hour is up, that the next wave of casualties will soon be trickling through her operating room again and she wasted her opportunity to rest. Yet she feels restful, buoyant even, as she downs a quick cup of cold, stale coffee and makes her way back to the operating room and the rhythm of medicine. 

Many of the soldiers she will treat will have scars for life after this battle, ones she will do her best to minimize, but right now she feels lighter for having one less scar of her own to deal with. The mood in the operating room is refreshed as the news of the Battle of the Citadel’s victories, the utter defeat of Saren and the geth, attackers start to filter through hospital ship.

Amidst the maelstrom of wreckage after the battle, there are some bright spots after all.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on [tumblr!](https://laelior.tumblr.com).


End file.
